Baltimoreans Mourn a Man Said to Have Been Killed by Their Neighbor

Activists and concerned neighbors held a vigil for Timothy Caughman on Saturday at St. Luke’s Church in Hampden, the Baltimore neighborhood where the man accused of murdering him, James Harris Jackson, lived.Credit
Noah Scialom for The New York Times

BALTIMORE — Under a gloomy sky, a crowd of a few dozen people assembled in the yard outside a stone church, a mostly white group who carried posters and wore T-shirts with messages like “Black Lives Matter,” “Stay Woke” and, simply, “BMORE Kind.” They had come on a Saturday evening to mourn a man they did not know, killed some 200 miles from here.

“Over the past few days, I learned he was the kind of man I would like to have as a neighbor,” Sarah Rice, the organizer of the vigil, said of Timothy Caughman, a 66-year-old man who, days earlier, stumbled into a New York City police station with stab wounds to his chest and back before he died. Ms. Rice repeated facts about Mr. Caughman she had gleaned from news coverage — his passion for meeting celebrities, his skill as a boxer.

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June Melchior playing in front of her house in Hampden, across the street from where Mr. Jackson lived.Credit
Noah Scialom for The New York Times

“He had a charm,” she added, “that would fit right in with our neighborhood.”

The authorities in New York said that James Harris Jackson, a 28-year-old white Army veteran, had traveled to New York City from Baltimore with a deep-seated hatred of black men and the intention of killing them, and he chose New York with the hope of drawing more attention. The authorities said Mr. Jackson attacked Mr. Caughman with a sword in Midtown Manhattan last Monday night as he scavenged for cans. Mr. Jackson later turned himself in to the police.

The case’s connection to Hampden, a rapidly evolving neighborhood in North Baltimore, is a tenuous one: Mr. Jackson’s most recent address was a rowhouse here. Before that, he had lived elsewhere in the city and in Towson, just over the city line in Baltimore County. And in the time he was in Hampden, neighbors said, he kept a low profile, spotted on the occasional visit to a liquor store or walking around, avoiding conversation on a block where residents tend to be chatty.

Still, it has been enough of a link to an unsettling act of violence that it has compelled some residents to consider their neighborhood’s complicated racial history.

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MARCH 26, 2017

By The New York Times

“He could have been behind any door anywhere, quietly living with this hatred when it burst out,” said Mary Pat Clarke, the city councilwoman whose district includes Hampden. “But it was here. It was a block from here.” She added, “It’s shocking and heartbreaking, and we take it personally here.”

Some have described Hampden as West Virginia meets Brooklyn, and in some ways, it looks the part. Aging industrial buildings perched on tree-covered slopes that make up the neighborhood’s western edge give way to a vibrant strip on West 36th Street, known as The Avenue, lined with quirky shops, a charcuterie bar and a gluten-free Italian cafe.

Some evenings, The Avenue pulses with crowds enjoying dinner and drinks or perusing book and record stores, many coming from outside the neighborhood. The side streets are almost as lively; children play as their parents hang out together and other neighbors walk by with their dogs. Residents say they were attracted to Hampden by the stores and restaurants within walking distance, as well as its access to nature. The wave of newcomers has driven up real estate prices and is changing the face of what had long been an insular and almost entirely white blue-collar enclave.

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Clipper Mill, a textile mill that has been converted into condos and restaurants, in Hampden, a rapidly evolving neighborhood.Credit
Noah Scialom for The New York Times

“There’s a new breed that’s moving in,” Clarence Harris, who has lived in Hampden for almost 50 years, said from his front stoop, where he joked with neighbors and pointed out Killer, the orange street cat he called “Hampden’s mascot.” “I guess you’d call them yuppies. They’re always trying to buy my house.”

Baltimore has a history of being a Balkanized city, with neighborhoods often cleaving along ethnic and religious lines, said Elizabeth M. Nix, a history professor at the University of Baltimore. Hampden, she said, has always been slightly different, its identity forged by the workers drawn from the South and Appalachia to the jobs in nearby mills and factories, and its geographic isolation from the rest of the city, with a river, a highway, park space and the campus of Johns Hopkins University hemming it in.

“It was very much a place of its own,” Professor Nix said.

Not unlike many communities in America, newer generations in Hampden have been left to confront an ugly racial past. The neighborhood gained broader notoriety from news accounts of racially tinged episodes, including one in the late 1980s when a black family was chased out by white residents who broke their windows, threw rocks and hurled racial epithets, and another in 1987 when there was a melee outside of a school involving black and white students that community leaders described as an outburst of mounting racial tension.

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Dozens of people assembled for the vigil Saturday evening to mourn Mr. Caughman, who was killed some 200 miles away.Credit
Noah Scialom for The New York Times

Bruce Bryan, a jewelry maker with a shop on The Avenue, grew up in Waverly, a nearby neighborhood. Mr. Bryan, who is white, remembered coming to Hampden with a black friend to buy wheels for their skateboards, and people in the neighborhood throwing bottles at them. “This neighborhood was not cute when I was a kid,” Mr. Bryan said.

Many neighbors said those attitudes were no longer welcome in Hampden, even if people who hold racist views might still be around. “I’m here,” said Jenifer Almond, a white resident who moved in about a year ago. “I’m an energy healer. I’m going to send out lots of love.”

As much as the neighborhood has changed, Hampden remains largely white, and its reputation has been hard to shake. Some black residents who are recent arrivals said that when they tell other black people elsewhere in the city where they live, they are met with a cocked eyebrow.

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A woman who yelled “All lives matter!” speaking with passers-by across the street from a vigil for Mr. Caughman at St. Luke’s Church in Hampden.Credit
Noah Scialom for The New York Times

Mr. Jackson’s arrest has been a reminder of that legacy. “It brought up the undercurrent of uneasy race relations,” Marlene Underwood, who moved to Hampden three years ago, said.

Black residents in Hampden said they did not face the kind of outright hostility that led previous families to flee. These days, though, they say they encounter far more subtle reminders that they are still very much in the minority in Hampden.

Shacara Waithe, who has lived in Hampden for four years, said she takes her 17-month-old daughter to story time at the local library every week, and has noticed that she is typically the only black mother in the room; a few are Asian, and the dozens of others are white. She also recalled a neighbor warning on a community message board that a “tall black guy” had been spotted walking around.

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The vigil in Hampden, Md. New York authorities said that Mr. Jackson, a 28-year-old white Army veteran, traveled to New York City from Hampden with the intention of killing a black person. They said he attacked and killed Mr. Caughman with a sword.Credit
Noah Scialom for The New York Times

“That tall black guy is my husband,” she replied. “He’s a pilot.”

Ms. Underwood, Ms. Waithe’s neighbor, said that sometimes when she sees other black people in the neighborhood, she cannot help wondering: “Is that our new neighbor, or are they just passing through?”

As residents heard of Mr. Caughman’s killing and how the suspect had lived in their neighborhood, some admitted that, initially, they assumed he might be a descendant of Hampden’s old guard. But as they learned otherwise, there were some who found the situation even more alarming. Mr. Jackson’s background aligned more closely with the people moving in: He was a transplant, who grew up in the suburbs, and was educated in one of Baltimore’s elite private schools.

“There’s this new Hampden, and there’s old Hampden,” Ms. Waithe said, standing along The Avenue, holding her daughter after the vigil. “And he’s not old Hampden, and that’s scary.”

Correction: March 26, 2017

An earlier version of this article misattributed a quotation. It was Ms. Underwood, not Ms. Waithe, who said she wondered, when seeing other black people in Hampden, “Is that our new neighbor, or are they just passing through?”

A version of this article appears in print on March 27, 2017, on Page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Baltimoreans Mourn a Victim in New York. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe